


sharp-edged corundum

by SolaSola



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: And I just think that's neat, Archetypical D&D classes as overused metaphor, But Ruby is the one who is the heir to everything Sapphria ever wanted for Candia, Campaign 05: A Crown of Candy, Character Study, Future Fic, Gen, Light Angst, Parallels, Post-Episode: s05e17 For Candia! (Part 2), Rogues (D&D), Ruby Rocks centric, Saccharina is the heir to everything Lazuli ever wanted for Candia, with a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:00:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25790254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolaSola/pseuds/SolaSola
Summary: When the mastermind sees the war coming, she bows her head and gives it the consideration it deserves but she does not go to war; she knows when the war will come to her and she is ready.And if this were a more magical story, Ruby thinks, Sapphria might have laughed delighted in the shadows over her shoulder. A peace full of rogues; a miracle and a mischief.[The Rocks family has two women who are princesses and rogues and sisters and joyful, after it all.Or: Ruby, in the after, finds herself the heir not to Lazuli's legacy but to Sapphria's.]
Relationships: Amethar Rocks & Citrina Rocks & Lazuli Rocks & Rococoa Rocks & Sapphria Rocks, Amethar Rocks & Ruby Rocks, Liam Wilhelmina Jawbreaker & Ruby Rocks, Ruby Rocks & Saccharina Frostwhip
Comments: 14
Kudos: 51





	sharp-edged corundum

**Author's Note:**

> Corundum: A mineral with two primary gem-forming varieties, ruby and sapphire. It is abrasive and weighty but extraordinarily clear. Notably, corundum is hard enough to cut nearly every mineral but diamond.

If this were a more magical story, it might say: Princess Sapphria watches over Ruby Rocks as she rises to imperial princess and advisor to the witch-queen of Candia. Perhaps Sapphria’s eye winks at Ruby from the shadows of the castle, or small berry-candy fingers flick at her hair, or a teasing, roguish smile flashes when Ruby looks over her shoulder and catches her. 

But the four daughters of King Jadain are gone with the rest of the Sugarplum Fairy’s magic and into whatever afterlife exists, or none at all. So this is not that more magical story, with their myth-wise shadows around every corner, and frankly Candia is plenty magic as is. Asking for more feels a bit greedy. 

In the first days after the retaking of Castle Candy, Ruby Rocks thinks she could be forgiven for being a little greedy. It is less that magic lies far from Candia now and more that magic feels far from herself. It is not that long ago that the mage hand she summoned was raspberry-blue with Lazuli’s magic; not that long ago since she knelt sobbing by sugar menhirs to scream, _what is the point of having magic if I can’t bring her back_ ; not that long ago since she owned Lazuli’s bow and her twin sister owned Rococoa’s rapier in a matching set.

Ruby misses Jet’s hand next to her to squeeze, misses her twin so much that some days her whole body aches with grief. But she has told Jet she loves her, and she has felt her shadow’s embrace as she walked down the misty road along with so many other Candian memories. Even when Ruby feels a little greedy, she knows she cannot bring Jet back. But there is something less tangible and no less comfortable than her twin sister that she misses in the magic. Ruby misses when magic was more than just _power_ —misses when magic was the aunts she wishes she could have met, leading her down a path to heroism that they had trod forty years before. Ruby misses when magic reminded her that it belonged to her, back. 

Ruby runs a little to catch up to her pops and her sister leaving a long, long advisement meeting and follows along, two steps behind Amethar’s left side. There is an empty space beside her where Jet would have fit, but Ruby trots along silently and listens to Amethar pointing out rooms she’s walked past her whole life without knowing all the stories. Amethar talks to Ruby and Saccharina both, about a young Sapphria racing through the castle on the run from Rococoa and a young Amethar building pillow fortifications in the middle of the throne room for toy battles. Ruby has stories of her own, ones that Saccharina doesn’t know and that Amethar missed too.

She can feel her new sister smile on her pops’ right side as stories anchor her in Castle Candy, every tiny dent in the wall a reminder of some secret mischief. Saccharina wants in on the family secrets, feels comforted by knowing where she belongs in this castle and where generations of Rocks have belonged before her. Ruby can almost see her placing her feet a little more solidly.

But even after that Ruby herself still feels a little lost. Who is she, in a world where the castle is retaken, in a world where her aunt cannot appear to her to guide her path and her family? How do you live after you get revenge? 

For all Ruby wields Aunt Lazuli’s bow, she does not wield her magic—Ruby’s an archer and a tumbler at heart, not a wizard holing up in her aunt’s libraries. She is not a fighter either, but she still carries Jet’s rapier (Aunt Rococoa’s sword before her). For someone who is not a fighter, Ruby will still carry in her core and in her darkest nights the knowledge of what it feels like to drive a watersteel dagger through a body. She feels a little lost, even in the castle she knows every nook and cranny and story of. 

But someday is someday, and there will be time to pull a purpose back into herself. For now Ruby is content to listen to her pops point out secret passages (there are more he doesn’t know about) and watch her sister’s growing smile as her shoulders slowly come down.

The Concordant Emperor and Empress have left for Comida, having already delayed leaving Castle Candy as long as they could. For the new Rocks sisters, there are long but good days in Castle Candy. Ruby meets Saccharina in the kitchens to eat breakfast together at ungodly hours—way too early after pulling all-nighters, way too late after sleeping in. They sit cross-legged right on the hearth—Saccharina pressing her back to the wall because she still feels safest that way and Ruby most at home sitting in places and ways that she’s not supposed to sit—and don’t need to talk when they pass the plate of sugary donut holes between them because _it’s still technically a breakfast food and they deserve it, okay._ If it’s early they’ll watch the light change from navy to watery grey and escape from the kitchens giggling before the staff wake up, and if it’s late they’ll stay and let the golden almost-noon light and the still-warm bricks of the hearth warm them up before they decide they both do actually have work to do. 

Other days, Ruby matches her nimble acrobatics to Saccharina’s summoning of tiny dense clouds of icy mint wind to act as extra steps when they climb to the roof of the keep. Ruby unpacks a picnic basket and Saccharina spreads out a pile of papers (she likes writing letters from up here, where she can look out across the horizon and maybe see where they’re going). They settle into one of the spots Ruby’s found where no one can see you from the ground or the windows. Lazily, Yak circles overhead and Cinnamon circles still higher, two butterscotch and red hot specks keeping watch and looking nearly the same size from this perspective. Ruby usually fills the air with chatter, trying her best to give Saccharina the sisterhood she needs, but when they’re on the roof they both quiet. 

They have spent hours together, not just on the roof but throughout the castle too. There are five secret passages that Ruby shows Saccharina that her pops doesn’t know about but she and Jet did. And there are things not from Ruby’s past but from her future, too—there is one tunnel that Ruby didn’t find, that she’s not really sure is a passage or just a hole because Swifty is the one who found it and he’s the only one remotely small enough to get into it. 

There are three secret rooms that Ruby knows about that Jet did not live to find. 

Ruby curls up in her bed some days and doesn’t go to breakfast with her sister. Instead she grips her locket so hard that half a heart imprints itself into her palm and tells her twin about this new Candia, tells her the secrets of Castle Candy that she wishes they could have found together, tells her about the life she is still living while Jet is not. It is not the same (of course it is not the same) but Ruby tells Jet anyway. And it doesn’t fix anything (of course it doesn’t fix anything) but it helps, a little, anyway. 

Ruby leans back on the slanted nut brittle roofing of the keep and asks, “Do you ever wish you could have met our aunts?” and Saccharina says, “Every day of my life.”

They talk about the elder Rocks sisters, a lot, but Ruby doesn’t talk about what it looks like when a blue wizard’s hand performs legerdemain, and Saccharina does not talk about eyes in mirrors. It doesn’t matter, anymore, so much as it might have. Because this is not a more magical story and the elder Rocks were powerful but they cannot haunt Castle Candy, anymore, so much as they might have. Ruby’s mage hand is the same red as her own skin, now, but most of the time she just keeps it invisible.

When Saccharina picks up Cumulous for rides on the back of Cinnamon and they follow the Spinning Star’s old maps to awaken teleportation circles hacked apart by Bulbian crusaders, she asks him what Lazuli was like. When she concludes up no-longer-war-councils and is just finishing up the council room snacks (no use in wasting them) with Theo, she asks him, too. 

But theirs is a hero worship, the relationship of a ward to the guardian he squired for and a monk to the founder who gave him purpose. Ruby understands, and Saccharina understands, that sometimes the elder Rocks sisters stop being candy-stone statues in a chapel no one uses these days and just get to be human, family they both wish they knew better. 

Ruby and Saccharina sit together in the room that’s become Saccharina’s office (although Ruby is more often perched on the windowsill, scribbling on a lap desk, than she ever is sitting in her chair) to write letters to Amethar in Comida. Their pops still can’t write for shit, and when missives come back tied to the leg of a white chocolate raven or occasionally Yak, if they’re feeling impatient, both sisters sit together and peer over each others’ shoulder trying to decipher his chickenscratch.

But Amethar does do his best to tell stories about his sisters, to tell his daughters stories about the aunts he also wishes they could have met. Amethar knew the Rocks sisters when they weren’t busy being heroes in stories and had time to just be human.

Empress Caramelinda sends much less illegible letters to Ruby, full of recommendations for things to study up on and reminders to check on upcoming festivals and arriving envoys so that Ruby can in turn remind Saccharina. Amethar asks if the sisters are practicing sparring with each other, whether either of them has beat Swifty in unarmed combat yet, how his former ward Liam is doing as master gardener. Amethar reminds these younger Rocks sisters to take time to just be human, too. 

Ruby struggles, with being her sister’s (her witch-queen’s, her sovereign’s, her lawful monarch’s) advisor. She finishes too many meetings having shrunken herself into a corner because she could barely follow the debate going on. Ruby takes deep breaths and reminds herself she is there as a _sister_ and not as a mastermind, that Saccharina says she _really does love to have you there, you’re a grounding force and also you Message me jokes and I can’t keep a straight face in front of the Duke of Savarin but you are extremely forgiven and please don’t stop_. 

Some days Saccharina goes to the library to find Caramelinda’s recommended tomes on statecraft, and Ruby excuses herself.

Ruby is not a mastermind and she thinks about Saccharina the cleric, Saccharina the mage, Saccharina who wields two swords at her hip even in the time of the Pax Candia in the halls of her own castle. 

Not every adventuring party can have its archetypical fighter, mage, cleric, and rogue but Ruby looks at the dusty statues in the chapel no one uses anymore and thinks, _Saccharina’s got three of you covered_. She sends an invisible mage hand to clean off the statues and tells them, “She’s doing what you would have wanted, I think, a lot of the days.”

It is not hard for Ruby to find herself slipping into the chapel more often, to add four more passed Rocks sisters to the one she already talks to often enough. She figures any afterlife worth its salt would put Jet and the elder Rocks together. “Did you know Saccharina is awakening Carnish magic too, and there are more dragons in the Great Stone Candy Mountains,” she tells Lazuli. “Did you know she and I toasted and then dissolved that fucking chicken nugget piece of ciabatta, like a sister-sister special,” she tells Rococoa. “Did you know she believes so deeply in her mission and lives it with every breath and keeps it in every bone of herself that even my rock-headed pops saw it right away, even when I didn’t,” she tells Citrina. 

Ruby thinks, _My sister the queen doesn’t need a lot_. But, Ruby thinks, what Saccharina might still need is a rogue; what she might need is some joy. And that, of all things, is something she just might be able to do.

Ruby skips reading through her mother’s tomes and leaves Saccharina in the library to find Liam and Swifty in Castle Candy’s ever-growing gardens. There is less and less sugargrass lawn, now. _“_ Why would I plant grass when there are so many more _fun_ seeds,” Liam says seriously when she asks about it. Swifty keeps challenging Ruby to unarmed combat (“Thanks but no thanks,” she tells him, “any luck on that three bedroom?” and that sets him off talking). 

Liam’s mostly a seed guy these days, he tells Ruby as they sit on on the edge of a raised bed. Mostly a seed guy, but he’s trying to become a little bit of a rock guy too. To know what kinda ground the seeds like. Ruby doesn’t know if having wished three Candias’ worth of fresh ground straight out of nothingness and having watched the Great Stone Candy Mountains sprout like weeds is helping at all with the rock guy thing, but it definitely can’t hurt.

“D’you ever think about how many rogues we ended up being?” Ruby asks Liam one day when they’re with five minutes deep into exploring something that might be a new secret passage or might be a dead end somewhere under the cola moat. Liam thinks for a moment and Ruby counts on her fingers. “I’m an archer, you’re an assassin, Swifty keeps refusing to tell us but there’s no way he’s _not_ one, that’s a lot for just one party.” 

“Swifty is for sure an assassin, I know one when I see one,” Liam nods. “Yeah, it’s a lot of us. I don’t think too many, though.”

Ruby doesn’t know if Jet’s one rogue level is on the tip of Liam’s tongue and he’s just not saying it, but she’s thankful for it. (Jet didn’t die a rogue, she died a fighter, and Ruby will never know if she was thankful for it). 

Liam doesn’t use his rogue levels nearly at all these days and is fine with it, mostly spends his time walking the woods for nice rocks and seeds and picking out ones to send to Primsy in letters. Even though Ruby ribs him for details all the time, he’s mostly staying quiet. She doesn’t really know what’s going on there, but Liam seems happy. 

He takes a bedroll and a tent and goes camping for almost a month in the New Great Stone Candy Mountains, far from Castle Manylicks and part of Candia’s fragile-new territory. When he comes back he has a bag full of new treasures he excitedly shows to anyone who asks and some who don’t. Liam hands Ruby his two best samples from the trip and tells her about rock candy corundum, bright blue and deep red. He says that the mineral is sharp and abrasive and can wear anything down in not that time at all, and he tells her that it is also unusual for something with such clarity to be so heavy and hard. Ruby turns his hard candy gems over in her hand and has to be careful not to cut herself. When she hands his samples back (they click together nicely), Liam slots them into little cubbies in a box he keeps tied with twine.

Ruby’s spent a lot of time asking her pops about Sapphria, wondering if Castle Candy has a few too many rogues these days and wondering if her aunt would wish for there to be just one, one with a little more wisdom and a little more charisma. 

She reads her pops’ chickenscratch and can almost feel his deep belly laugh. “Naw, no way, we used to get up to so much shit,” he tells her, and Ruby can hear it in his voice even though it took her five minutes to disentangle his inky words (her pops needs blotting paper). “Sapphria was so mean sometimes but she’d do it because she loved you. She’d’ve liked you.”

Even if it can’t mean that much—her pops can’t _know_ and neither can she—Amethar saying it still warms Ruby’s core. 

The Princess Sapphria Rocks of the bards’ tales and of Calorum’s history books is not even close to the Sapphria Amethar remembers. He has heard primogens and senators and lords praise “your youngest sister, so sweet and poised, a model diplomat” and struggled not to burst out laughing.

The Sapphria Amethar remembers sneaks into her siblings’ rooms and bounces on their beds to wake them up at the crack of dawn. She gives her sisters shit and gags out loud when she doesn’t like their ideas and steals them extra cake from the kitchens when they need it. 

“What a shame, I’ve used up all my dealing-with-people skills being _undercover_ for _five months_ , Citrina can go deal with Mother,” this Sapphria groans from underneath four pillows.

“Does anyone actually care? I'm not wed yet!” this Sapphria shoots at Rococoa in the garrison at Castle Manylicks. 

“I promise it will not take three days like last time, Lazuli, even you have time to put away the scrying spell and play some chess with your dearest younger sister who needs practice in tactics,” this Sapphria says, standing over Lazuli’s bedroll at an ungodly hour of night. 

Lazuli and Rococoa’s favorite tools were things Amethar could hand down to his twin daughters in weighty candystone cases, and Citrina’s book still stands in Castle Candy, but Ruby asks him about her youngest aunt’s tools. “Guess she must’ve been buried with them,” Amethar tells Ruby, “because none of us could find them on her even in death.” 

Amethar remembers Sapphria’s tiny daggers, even smaller than her thumb and even sharper than her words, braided into her hair like pins. Anyone with the dubious misfortune to never have seen her in battle or who didn’t know her well enough would have said her weapon of choice was simply her words.

But as for a favorite tool, Amethar thinks, it must’ve been her game sets, dice and cards and coins playing over her fingers. Something she’d learned even if it’d never come up in a palace, something that served her well as a spy in villages and encampments on the other sides of castle walls. 

“We all stopped betting with her because she’d cheat half the time, and make us think she was cheating the other half,” Amethar laughs. 

Because this Sapphria loves intrigue, but she loves joy more. 

For all Sapphria was a dangerous rogue, she was a diplomat too. For all she died in wartime, she did not die in battle. Even Lazuli got lost in a million timelines, but Sapphria was at her best juggling them all, setting up plans and backups and backup plans, moving between contingencies as smoothly as water and just as dangerous. 

When the mastermind sees the war coming, she bows her head and gives it the consideration it deserves but she does not go to war; she knows when the war will come to her and she is ready.

And if this were a more magical story, Ruby thinks, Sapphria might have laughed delighted in the shadows over her shoulder. A peace full of rogues; a miracle and a mischief. 

For so many of the years Sapphria listened and mediated and persuaded in other nations’ castles and came home only rarely and often silently, there was another mastermind in the halls of Castle Candy, at the right hand of the prince fifth in line to the throne. 

Castle Candy knows masterminds too well. Ruby wonders if perhaps it might be tired of them, might be okay shepherding two new rogues into peace along different paths. 

Ruby thinks about the other Rocks sister who stayed “Princess” all her life, no General or Archmage or Saint or Bastard or Queen. Saccharina collects titles like they’re sprinkles on icing, Ruler and Witch-Queen and Priestess and Archmage and Sorceress, but Ruby knows what it is like to walk the long arc of your life and come back where you came from. 

“I’ll be back,” Ruby tells her sister, and she looks back at Castle Candy once and then twice and then doesn’t look back again. Ruby tucks herself into the Swirler Sisters troupe and writes Saccharina letters from a lap desk tucked into a wagon tucked into the still-new edges of Candia. 

She won’t write Saccharina in twinspeak, but they have a code of their own and Ruby is confident no spymaster has the arcane papers of Lazuli Rocks one would need to crack the code, a book cipher large enough to need Lazuli’s whole library. Ruby still writes Liam in twinspeak and sends him seeds sealed into her envelopes even though he’s probably seen them all before. She sends him nice threads from every village the Swirler Sisters visit and every tailor’s shop they buy their costumes from, though, that he can send to Primsy. Those she knows he will not find for himself. 

Ruby belongs in the sky, and she will not keep one foot on the ground but she will keep her eyes there. For years Ruby will remember what it looked like as Saccharina grounded herself in Castle Candy, lightning coming to earth, tamping out her own space. It took a circus tent three stories tall to give Ruby enough space, and it took flying in the air to bring her down to earth, but she knows where she belongs and she knows which way home is even if she is rarely there. 

The Swirler Sisters troupe is busy but not too busy for Ruby to learn to dice against them. She plays sleight-of-hand shell games with circus patrons, an invisible mage hand searching their pockets while they watch to check for weapons before they enter the tent. On nights when the troupe’s wagons circle up near a town Ruby takes a deck of cards and a smile and finds the tavern, and most nights she wins gold but every night she keeps her ears open and wins whispers she can write back. 

Someone tries to call Ruby spymaster and she snorts. “An age of magic, and the queen needs an acrobat?” After all this time there are as many jokes and sly jabs in her letters as there is arcane cipher; she writes as much about her day so that her sister can know about it as she does about intelligence the queen should learn. 

Ruby gets her troupe to drop her off in Dulcington before dawn, and she makes her way silently into the castle before the herald can make a presentation of the imperial princess on her visit home. Her bow is on her back and her bag is in her hand as she follows shadowy passages home. 

Before she wakes up her sister, Ruby finds the chapel in the heart of the keep. She invisibly mage hands it open, a little trick she’s come to love so that every door or tent flap seems to be just a little eager to let her in. These days, the chapel does not often see communion with the Bulb, but it is still just as deep and open and reflective. Her four aunts gaze down in candystone, the early morning light not quite at the right angle yet to light up their statues. 

Ruby’s eyes are clear and her heart is heavy, but she knows what she is here to do before she goes to find her sister for a chat over breakfast, before they will have to be princess and queen. It is the kind of heaviness that comes from something valuable— something to be careful with but not something that will shatter.

Ruby takes her bow off her back. One last time, she runs her fingers over spiky green crystal—as her fingers pass by the bowstring’s nock point, a poison green arrow seems to first shudder into place and then disappear when her fingers don’t stay there. Ruby shuts Sourscratch up in its marble candystone case, mage handing shiny buckles shut and adding a touch of snare magic. Flickerish has been snugged into its own case there for years now. 

“Aunt Lazuli, I can’t carry this for you anymore,” Ruby tells the unlistening blue face of the Archmage. “It was a really good bow, and thank you. But I just don’t shoot that much anymore, and it’s big and jagged and doesn’t really fit in my circus packs. We’re traveling light now that Candia’s so wide and magic is just easier.”

Ruby slides the marble case back into the armory next to the chapel and looks back up at Lazuli on her way out. “There will be many more Rocks after me to carry your bow, Aunt Lazuli,” Ruby says. Ruby spares a look at Sapphria’s statue, standing a step below Lazuli’s dais and just low enough that the transparent stone is capturing the morning light creeping over the horizon. “For now I’d rather just be a sister than an archer. And I think you’d be proud too.” 

Sourscratch was never that heavy for all its stone, but Ruby’s heart feels light and she gives in to turn a cartwheel in the hallway before she heads off to find her sister. 

“It is helpful for Candia to have a princess who brings the peace that comes from laughter,” Ruby writes seriously in a letter to whatever advisor is questioning her role in her sister’s cabinet this time. 

“And I’d say it’s just as helpful for Candia to know the dismay that comes from _just_ a hint of mischief!” she says gleefully, raising a glass of cola wine as her troupe counts the winnings from two hours of three-card monte. 

Ruby is happy, and roguish, and magic, and she does not care if she is a blip in the history books of the Pax Candia. She would have it no other way. 

It is years later and a saint’s day celebration, one of Saccharina’s birthdays. The anniversary isn’t quite significant enough and the queen herself doesn’t honor saint’s days enough to necessitate an imperial visit to Castle Candy if the queen were anyone other than the emperor’s daughter. 

Ruby is home from the Swirler Sisters and meets her parents’ carriage at the gatehouse, shoulders back and in a gown with the same slashed and puffed sleeves she won’t give up. Her grin is irreverent even as she steeples her fingers together politely and offers her (aging but not _that_ old, come _on now_ ) parents a hand down out of the carriage.

Her father takes her by the shoulders and searches his daughter’s face. “Oh, you look so much like your aunt,” he says, and Ruby doesn’t have to ask which one. She doesn’t carry Lazuli’s bow anymore, doesn’t carry Flickerish either or any weapon anyone can see. But Ruby is slight of her ways, and cunning, and sly, and happy despite it all. 

Ruby offers her father her elbow as they walk towards the keep and flicks a hand of cards out of her other sleeve, not even pretending to wipe her grin off her face. “And I cheat half the time like her too. Care for a game, when we get you settled in home?”

**Author's Note:**

> It's about finding where the hero's story needs you and realizing you were there all along, it's about starting and ending your story in the same place but that doesn't mean you didn't move and tumble and change and grow!!
> 
> I have yet to find all the Sapphria stans but in the days since the finale I have well and truly become one. She simply is the Rocks sister with an unfathomable amount of power and Ruby fits way too well into her legacy—you absolutely love to see it and also to write 4k of incomprehensible purple prose about it, folks. 
> 
> For all its it's-not-that-deep, this fic was so much fun to write and I kept being struck by "oh fuck that fits too well" and needing to post about it. I can only hope the actual fic did my rambling justice—I just have a lot of feelings about Saccharina being all the Rocks sisters but one, and ruby and sapphire literally being the same mineral but with different impurities, and what it means to adventure and then to come home. 
> 
> Kudos and comments feed my lil creator soul like Riz chowing down on Kalvaxus, and I reply to every comment!
> 
> This fic is rebloggable [here](https://acedetectivegukgak.tumblr.com/post/625918706213617664/sharp-edged-corundum-solasola-dimension-20) on my d20 tumblr, [@acedetectivegukgak](https://acedetectivegukgak.tumblr.com/)!


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